


Second chances and lost and found families

by normalisoverrated



Series: Second Chances and Families [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst and Feels, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Parent Natasha Romanov, Protective Natasha Romanov, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:00:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27441583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/normalisoverrated/pseuds/normalisoverrated
Summary: 5 times Natasha thought about telling someone she has a daughter plus 1 time she didn't have to.Won't make much sense without reading second chances and fought for families.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: Second Chances and Families [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638475
Comments: 14
Kudos: 84





	Second chances and lost and found families

**Author's Note:**

  * For [insomnia_anonymous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insomnia_anonymous/gifts).



> I honestly wasn't planning on writing anything else in this series, but insomnia_anonymous made this amazing edit for this series and then this happened! 
> 
> Edit is here: https://imgur.com/a/LdvPsyM

Natalia knew something was wrong with her body. Her body was her greatest weapon, and knowing it made the difference between life and death every mission. She could tell without looking the location and severity of any wound, no matter how slight, and she could always tell when exhaustion was destroying her from the inside. She could, and had, catalogue her own symptoms and work out what she’d been poisoned and counter it with without needing to risk medical attention. She _knew_ her own body.

This was part of the reason it was so disturbing that she couldn’t work out what was wrong with her. The other part was the sheer danger of living with an unknown weakness in her body. It could get her killed. Or worse, it could compromise the mission.

It _was_ compromising the mission.

She wiped her mouth with a piece of toilet paper and threw it into the toilet, giving a weak little moan and subtly signalling weakness with her body language. A little of the disgust on her mark’s face faded away, but not nearly enough. She needed the man to want her, and bolting out of bed to puke into the toilet was not helping with that. She’d had the man in the palm of her hand three minutes ago, now she was scrabbling to regain control over the situation. She could do it, she was the Black Widow, but it wasn’t going to be easy.

She really needed to know what was wrong. She needed to _fix it_ before it cost her her life or the mission.

“I must have eaten something bad.” she said, using her body language to trigger protective instincts in the man, manipulating chauvinism with the ease of long practice. He softened further, and fetched her a glass of water, and a minute later he was solidly dancing to her tune again, albeit a different play from earlier.

Two hours later she finally tricks the man into giving up the intel she needs, and she allows herself to puke again (one advantage of the reoccurring bouts of nausea, she does not have to force herself to be sick) to get the guy to throw her out so avoid risking getting ill himself. Her orders are not to kill him. The KGB need him alive, for now anyway. Instead the mark says “You’re not pregnant are you?”

Natalia is too well-trained to let her laughter pass her lips, but the words spark a morbid amusement inside her. Of course she isn’t pregnant. The Red Room made sure of that. Like many other things, Natalia had chosen to sacrifice that choice in service of the motherland.

Natalia cannot remember making that choice, but she knows she must have made it, because she remembers the graduation ceremony. She serves the motherland, that is her purpose. Even if something cries out inside her at the memory of the ceremony. But such thoughts are disloyal, a result of western propaganda reaching her, and Natalia mustn’t focus on them.

She assures the mark she is not pregnant, and doses herself with a mild drug from one of her rings, inducing sweats and flushed cheeks and achieving the desired effect of being sent away. She returns to the tiny safe-house she has been living for the past week, and prepares an evening meal. The mission is over, and has been successful, but she mustn’t leave too soon, or she will cast suspicion on herself. She pukes up half the meal, and curses to herself in Russian. She still cannot even work out when she might have been poisoned. Nor can she think of any poison that would induce these sporadic boats of nausea, without other distinctive symptoms.

Ridiculously, her marks words echo in her ears, and she recognises that her symptoms do fit with pregnancy. It is impossible, the effectiveness of the ceremony has been demonstrated multiple times over the years, but Natalia is trained to explore any possibility, no matter how impossible. It is what makes her so effective, and it is what has kept her alive, so she flushes the toilet and takes herself to a shop to buy a loaf of bread and slip a pregnancy test into her pocket.

She has, for obvious reasons, never used one before, but the instructions are simple and she sets it on the windowsill as she washes her hands and waits to confirm what she already knows.

She does not expect the result to be positive.

It is wrong. It has to be wrong. She cannot possibly be pregnant. It is not possible.

She goes to another shop, and steals two more pregnancy tests, both different brands from the first one. She returns to the apartment and uses them, then waits for them to show their negatives.

The two minutes seem far longer than they really are and Natalia scolds herself for her anxiety. There is no reason for it. She is not pregnant. No matter what western propaganda suggested to her, she chose to give up that ability in service of the motherland.

She can’t remember when she heard propaganda teaching her it had not been her choice. The thought makes her head hurt, and she shakes it off. She must not indulge in such weakness. She was not one of the weak agents who needed help to remember who they served and why. She had not needed such help in a long time, and she had no intention of needing it again. She chose not to think about why.

The tests were positive.

Her breath caught in her throat and one traitorous hand moved to cover her stomach. Was it possible? Could she be pregnant?

It shouldn’t be possible, but the evidence lay in front of her with three separate tests. The evidence lay in the wrongness inside her body. The evidence lay in the slow growth of that wrongness over weeks, with no discernable cause that made sense. Was it really something wrong with her body if a life was growing inside her?

Natalia sank down to sit on the bathroom floor, holding all three tests in her hand. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, even though there was no purpose for such as expression, no mark to see it and bend to her will. It was strange, this desire to smile for no reason but herself. For no reason than the impossible news that a body was growing within her own. She didn’t want to look away from the tests, from the proof of impossibility. Irrational fear tugged at her at the thought, ridiculous because there was no threat in the apartment, no reason to be afraid. Why would it matter whether or not it was impossible for the tests to really be right. Why would it matter that it was impossible for her to really be pregnant. She’d chosen to give up that ability. It had been her choice.

Her head hurt and she stopped thinking about it. Instead she thought back on her recent missions, allowing herself to indulge just a little longer in this fantasy. She hadn’t slept with a mark in over two months, a long time for the Black Widow. It was rarely so long between times when missions necessitated it. The last time had been a mark in Hunan.

The mark she’d been sent to extract information from. The mark who potentially was connected to a powered individual.

Her breath caught in her throat, and her fingers betrayed her, tightening around the tests until her skin was white. What if he had been connected to someone who was powered? What if....what if she _could_ be pregnant? What if there really _was_ a life growing inside of her.

One of the tests snapped in her vice grip, and her eyes fastened on them again, a laugh bubbling up inside her and slipping past her lips. The sound of her laughter was alien, she couldn’t remember ever laughing for anyone but a mark. It sounded so happy, so joyful, so alien to Natalia. Marks made sounds like that, civilians made sounds like that. Natalia did not.

But there was a life growing inside of her! She was going to be a mother! It was a gift she’d never dreamed she’d have. A child. She was having a child!

She rose lithely from the floor and left the bathroom, pulling the landline to call her latest handler. Something this significant could not wait for her return, her handler would wish to know immediately. It would affect her performance in the field significantly for the next six or seven months. Her handler needed to know.

So why wasn’t she switching the radio on?

It would affect her service to the motherland. It might take her out of the field for months. Operatives were not meant to have children, it was why they had the graduation ceremonies, especially not the Black Widow. Operatives did not have children, they did not have families, they did not have any place in the world. Her purpose was to serve the motherland as a knife, it was not her place to give it new children.

She had chosen that. Hadn’t she?

A tremor shuddered through her body, and for the first time she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t remember. There was so much she couldn’t remember. It had never seemed important before. She couldn’t remember why it hadn’t.

There was a life growing inside of her, surely that was a cause for celebration. But the Black Widow was not meant to have children. She was not meant to have anything but the mission. She was a knife, she was not a mother.

Silently she replaced the radio in the cupboard. She would tell her handler when she returned. Face to face she could make him see that this was part of her service to the motherland. She could make him see why she should keep this child. After all, the motherland always needed new recruits. The idea made a fresh shudder go through her body, and for a moment she wondered if being an operative was the best life for her child. Her head split open with pain and she shook herself hard for the thought. She was Natalia Romanova, she was better than listening to western propaganda.

But two days later she stood before her handlers desk and finished her report of the mission, detailing the intelligence she’d extracted, and her handler asked the familiar question and she hesitated.

“Good Natalia. Anything else to report?”

She must tell him. He would see why the child was important for the motherland. He or she might be as good an operative as she was. He would see. He needed to know. Natalia was compromised for field work, he needed to know.

“Anything else to report agent?” her handler said impatiently.

“Nothing to report.” she said, and she turned and left.

There was no certainty the baby would live, there was no need for anyone else to know yet.

Natalia didn’t know why the thought made her so afraid.

\------------------

Jia Ying held her Pauchok like she was the most precious thing in the entire world, and Natalia knew she was making the right choice.

She can still hear the crack of the gun echoing in her ears, and terror still grips her heart even days after the bullet had almost hit her daughter. This is the right choice. Her Pauchok will be safe here.

She feels an irrational urge to cry, and angrily smothers it. She has not cried except to trick a mark since she was a tiny child. She is not so weak. Love is for children.

Her Pauchok was a child.

She would be loved, that was clear from Jia Ying’s expression. There was no need for Natalia to be the one to give it. Such sentimentality was weak.

Natalia was compromised. She needed to fix herself before she got herself killed.

Not telling the KGB about her pregnancy was bad enough. Manipulating her way onto a mission not intended for her was bad enough. It was weak sentimentality. It did not serve her motherland. Not giving her daughter over to the KGB and hence the Red Room was bad enough. She needed to pull herself together.

But when Jia Ying passed her Pauchok back she took her, cherishing the slight weight of her daughter in her arms, looking down at her small, wrinkly face and wondering if this was what love felt like.

She was so, so compromised.

She bounced her arms up and down gently, the movement strange even after three months of doing it. It was too gentle for Natalia, too at odds with the violence Natalia has been immersed in for as long as she can remember. She thinks about how her daughter will not grow up with that violence, and it reminds her again that this is the right choice.

It doesn’t feel right. Something deep inside Natalia is tearing into ragged pieces and she wonders if this is what a broken heart feels like. She wants to leap to her feet and take her daughter and run, but she knows she must not. She wants to scream that her Pauchok is hers, her daughter, hers, but she can’t bring herself to. She doesn’t think she can do what she must if she speaks those words aloud.

She has said only two words since she arrived. ‘She’s yours’.

She wanted to scream that Pauchok was her daughter, but she did not. She had to protect her Pauchok, and she couldn’t do that and be her mother too. Her Pauchok was not her daughter. Not anymore.

Still, hours later, when Jia Ying was asleep, she hesitated over Pauchok’s cradle. Her lips formed dangerous words she dared not give voice. Words that had been a lie so many times over but were not this time. Words that scared Natalia more than any bullet. Unspoken words that tore Natalia to pieces inside yet somehow left no visible wound as she silently left the house and headed out of the country. Unspoken words that cracked layers upon layers of programming and set her on a path that would eventually lead to her defecting from everything she’d ever known. Words that wrapped around her shattered heart as she walked away from her baby girl.

_I love you_

\----------------

Natasha read through the document Maria handed her, feeling a strange sense of disorientation as she read through the major parts of her past. It had been three months since Clint had brought her in. Three months since Clint had spared her life and recruited her to Shield. Three months of interrogations and deprogramming and pain as she relived and fought to escape her past. Three months of tearing down the building blocks of her reality and struggling to rebuilt it. Natasha still wasn’t sure what her new reality was, wasn’t sure who she was.

Maria wanted her to sign the document, confirming that it contained all the important facts about her former life shield needed to know about.

It didn’t contain a single word about her daughter.

Technically speaking, shield didn’t _need_ to know that she had a daughter. Her Pauchok was safe, hidden away with no idea who her mother was, and as long as she remained that way, she couldn’t be used against Natasha and therefore shield didn’t need to know.

She had a feeling Maria wouldn’t see it that way. Maria had started warming up to her in the last two weeks, and was slowly creeping towards being someone Natasha might come to trust. Natasha thought the woman might be starting to trust her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about lying to someone who trusted her. Who trusted _Natasha_ rather than one of the many covers she’d been. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a lot of things. It was difficult knowing how you felt when you’ve been trained to be nothing but what you are told to be, what is necessary for the mission. Natasha doesn’t know how to make choices for herself.

For a moment she considers telling Maria about her daughter. Shield have not betrayed her yet, and she’s 75% sure they will not. But she’s only 20% sure she can trust Maria, and telling a spy agency about her daughter makes her gut clench in fear, remembering the Red Room and questioning if Shield was really so different. She will not risk it she decides. Coulson said Natasha could choose who she was now. He said she could and should choose her own boundaries. Natasha isn’t sure she really understands what those are, and the idea of being permitted them is still alien. But if she is allowed to have them she will use them for her daughter. Risking her daughter is her boundary. It is the secret limit of her cooperation. She has given them every terrible part of her past. She will keep this one good part to herself. She will protect her little girl.

She stops pretending to read the document and picks up a pen, signing her new name and passing the document back to the deputy director.

“This is everything we need to know?” Maria checked.

Natasha nodded “It’s everything, I swear.”

“Good, you may go.”

Natasha nodded awkwardly and left, walking back to the bunk she’d been given opposite Clint. It felt strange being allowed to walk free. It was stupid allowing her to do so, although Natasha wasn’t nearly naïve enough to think nobody was tracking her through the security footage. The KGB would never have risked it, but then the KGB didn’t trust it’s own agents, nevermind formerly enemy ones. She’s starting to realise Shield is different from the KGB in ways she could never have imagined.

She wonders if Shield might one day trust her enough to allow her to leave unsupervised. She could visit her daughter. The thought sparks a longing inside her so deep she couldn’t even begin to describe it. To see how her Pauchok had grown. To watch her play from afar, seeing her little girl safe and happy, growing up normal and protected, far away from everything she’d suffered.

\-----------------

Natasha doesn’t fight as Clint opens her mouth and drops a pill into it, just swallows it and pukes into the bin Clint shoves under her nose. She doesn’t particularly care if she dies of alcohol poisoning, but she’s given up on fighting Clint. Vodka wasn’t making anything better.

Nothing could make anything better.

Her Pauchok was dead.

Bile burned her throat, already raw from drinking a bottle and a half of straight vodka, and she didn’t care.

Her daughter was dead.

Dead.

Her Pauchok had never hurt anyone. Had barely been a toddler when she’d been killed according to the torn calendar on the wall of the ransacked house where her Pauchok was meant to be _safe_. She’d been a baby. Had she even been old enough to walk? Had she ever said first words? Had she even been old enough to understand what love was?

Clint held a bottle of water to her lips and she opened her mouth reflexively, letting him pour water in and swilling it around then spitting. The movement stretched her shoulders out and rubbed the handcuffs against her wrists. She could get out of them, she had a dozen times since Clint had broken the lock on her door and confiscated her vodka. But she was too tired, too drunk, too heartbroken to bother. Even the brief rage that had enveloped her when Clint took the vodka and cuffed her so she couldn’t get more was gone. There was nothing left in Natasha to fight with.

Her baby girl was dead.

She’d been dead for years.

Dead before she even left the KGB.

Was it the KGB? Had it been them that followed the Black Widow’s trail to a small village and a brown eyed baby? Or had it been one of her many other enemies? She’d probably never know. They’d killed her baby, and it was her fault. Her ledger was pouring red with blood but this, this felt somehow heavier than everything else.

Her Pauchok would never grow up. Never run and play. Never watch the sun rise or set. Never know any beauty in life. Never smile or laugh again. She was dead.

Natasha felt like she’d died with her.

A month later she and Clint stand side by side as Coulson reaches the half hour mark of his lecture on recklessness. Clint shuffles by her side, his shoulders curling in with guilt shouldn’t be his. It was Natasha’s fault. She was the one who wouldn’t stop taking suicide missions. She was the one who convinced another handler to send her on missions meant for a team and not file any paperwork on it. She was the one who didn’t tell that handler she was supposed to be on injury leave. Clint shouldn’t have started following her onto suicide missions, but it wasn’t his fault she wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t his fault Coulson came back from his own mission and caught them. It was hers.

Coulson is somehow getting even better at lectures and the words are actually piercing through the fog of numbness that wasn’t really numb, and grief sharper than any stab would is creeping through the holes in her walls. This is worse than any torture. She’d let herself be tortured a thousand times if it could bring her daughter back.

She wants to tell Coulson it’s not Clints fault, but her throat is too tight and she doesn’t think words will come out even if she opens her mouth. Coulson eventually dismisses them with a demand for honest mission reports and an explanation for ‘ _what you were thinking’_ on his desk tomorrow morning. He gets the former but never the latter. They walk back to their bunks in silence, both limping slightly, and Clint follows her into her bunk and slams the door behind him.

“Please tell me you’re done with the suicide missions.” he says wearily, and Natasha opens her mouth to say she is, to say she’s sorry, but all that comes out is a choked sob. Alarm breaks across her friends face but it is like a dam has broken and Natasha breaks. She sinks to the floor and she doesn’t fight as Clint wraps his arms around her and for the first time since she was tiny she genuinely cries. She cries like the entire world has ended because it feels like it has. She cries because her Pauchok was barely a toddler and her world was ended and she cries because this grief feels worse than dying.

She cries and cries and cries and Clint never asks why and Natasha wonders how the world could give _her_ a friend like Clint and yet kill her innocent daughter. She cries until she has no tears left only an indescribable grief she knows will never leave her. Clint hugs her tightly as if he can hold her together and Natasha think about telling him what she’s lost.

But her Pauchok is dead and gone and nothing will bring her back and she doesn’t think she can bear talking about her. Her Pauchok is dead and her grief is too raw, too unbearably overwhelming and Natasha cannot bring herself to voice what she had lost.

So she lets Clint pick her up and put her in bed and she lets the truth go unvoiced, like the words shed mouthed so long ago above her daughters cradle.

\-------------------

It has been over a decade since she realised her daughter was dead and she’d thought she’d come to be able to cope with the grief, but this was something new.

Lila Barton was only hours old and her weight in Natasha’s arms was unbearably familiar. It had been so long since she’d held her own daughter in her arms, and yet just now it felt like yesterday. The newborn looked so much like her Pauchok had that Natasha was terrified she was going to disappear before her eyes and somehow just die. She was terrified that agents were going to swarm through the windows and door and kill Lila like her Pauchok had been killed.

Laura was looking at her strangely and Natasha felt so many words on the tip of her tongue but she refused to voice them. She wanted to tell Laura she’d held a newborn girl before, that she’d had her own daughter and loved her like she loved Lila. But this was a place and time of life and she couldn’t speak of death here. She wanted to promise that she’d make sure Lila was safe, that she’d never be killed for her parentage as her Pauchok had, but she’d promised to keep her Pauchok safe too and she’d failed. She wanted to beg the universe to spare this child but the universe had never listened to her. She wanted to pretend her love would be enough to protect her goddaughter but it hadn’t been enough to protect her daughter

Lila blinked tiny little eyelids open and looked up at her and Natasha cannot bear her grief anymore. She passes Lila back to Clint and avoids his questioning eyes and leaves the hospital room and refuses to look back. She drives back to the farmhouse and climbs up to the roof of the barn where nobody is likely to look for her and she stares unseeingly out across the farm and doesn’t swipe away the tears that slide down her cheeks. Her breath doesn’t hitch and she doesn’t shake but the tears keep running down her face as she stares blindly out into a world that her daughter will never know. She cries silently because she can’t bring herself to stop the tears but there is no use asking the world to hear her tears and help. There is no help coming.

Her daughter is gone.

So she stands on the barn roof for hours, silently weeping for the life her daughter never got to live, and then she packs her things and leaves the farmhouse before Laura and Clint can come back with the newborn that reminds her so unbearably of another.

\----------------

When asked later, Natasha would never, ever be able to describe what it had been like to see her daughter walk into Coulson’s office. She could never describe in any way that truly expressed how it had felt when the dull, ever present grief had stuttered and an impossible flame of hope had lit inside. She could never describe the way long held despair had turned to hope when she’d seen her daughters face.

Her memory of it was blurry, an impression of feelings more than words, only Daisy sharp in the memory, everything else background and irrelevant until her daughter had run and a rush of terror had washed over her as her daughter slipped away again.

“Where did she come from” she’d asked Coulson, begging him to confirm what she suspected. What couldn’t be true but had to be true because if it was her Pauchok was _alive_. For the first time in almost two decades she let herself hope her baby girl might not be dead. If she was, if her looks were just a coincidence, Natasha hadn’t been able to bear thinking about it.

“Hunan” Coulson had said, and impossibly it was true.

Her daughter was alive.

She was _alive_.

Somehow, somehow, she was alive. She was healthy. She was alive.

Clint had connected the dots immediately, undoubtedly remembering the village because of Nat’s reaction to it, but even then he hadn’t known, not yet. How could he? Natasha had never once mentioned her daughter, never once spoken of what she’d lost, even when Clint had his own kids. He hadn’t known, not until she talked about the safe-house in Italy and cutting the umbilical cord with a knife. Not until May asked what happened to the mother and she’d laughed, hysterical with shock and hope and disorientation. What happened to the mother? She’d thought her baby was dead. For almost two decades. She’d thought her baby girl was dead.

She hadn’t needed to tell Clint who her Pauchok was. Clint had always been able to read her better than anyone, and she hadn’t had to say anything else.

She’d never been able to really express what she’d felt in that moment, when her daughter became alive to her again, not even to herself, but it didn’t matter. Daisy was alive.

She was alive, and even though it had been a long road to get to where they were, they were family.

Natasha had lost her daughter, and found her again and somehow the universe had given her a second chance, and she wasn’t going to waste it. Whatever the future held, she would protect her family.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry it's a bit angsty.


End file.
